TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 40993 SUBJECT: EP250704a / GRB 250704B: end of optical plateau phase and rapid fading of the counterpart DATE: 25/07/06 20:50:24 GMT FROM: Antonio Martin-Carrillo at UCD,Space Science Group <antonio.martin-carrillo@ucd.ie> J. An (NAOC), A. Martin-Carrillo (UCD), D. B. Malesani (DAWN/NBI and Radboud), X. Liu (NAOC), A. K. Haris-Kiss (Helsinki Univ.), M. Korpi-Lagg (Aalto Univ.), S. Wedemeyer (Univ. Oslo), A. Casasbuenas Corral (IAC), report on behalf of a larger collaboration: We performed further observations of the field of the EP250704a (Li et al., GCN 40941) also detected by SVOM (GRB 250704B; Wang et al., GCN 40940), using the StanCam camera mounted on the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT). We obtained 3x300 s exposures in the Bessel-R and I bands, starting at 2025-07-05 at 23:49:00 UT (~39.54 hr after the EP trigger). In our stacked image, the optical afterglow detected by COLIBRÍ (Schneider et al., GCN 40942), BOOTES-5 (Perez-Garcia et al., GCN 40957), Pan-STARRS (Gillanders et al., GCN 40958), SVOM/VT (Xin et al., GCN 40960), GROWTH-India (Mohan et al., GCN 40962), SAO RAS (Moskvitin et al., GCN 40963), JinShan (Liu et al., GCN 40965), VLT/X-shooter (An et al., GCN 40966), VLT/HAWK-I (Yang et al., GCN 40970), NOT (Martin-Carrillo et al., GCN 40971), FTW (Busmann et al., GCN 40974) and GSP (Li et al., GCN 40975), the optical counterpart is detected at a preliminary magnitude of: i = 21.56 +/- 0.14 (AB), calibrated against nearby Pan-STARRS sources and not corrected for Galactic extinction. Compared to our previous measurement (Martin-Carrillo et al., GCN 40971), the new magnitude indicates a rapid decay (effective power-law index ~ 1.8), in stark contrast with the flat / rising behavior observed over the first ~16 hr after the trigger (e.g., Gillanders et al., GCN 40958; Yang et al., GCN 40970; Martin-Carrillo et al., GCN 40971; Busmann et al., GCN 40974). View this GCN Circular online at https://gcn.nasa.gov/circulars/40993. --- To unsubscribe, open this link in a web browser: https://gcn.nasa.gov/unsubscribe/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJlbWFpbCI6InZzbmV0LW...